geoengineering

Before we get to today’s topic–engineering the climate– let me call your attention to a couple of news items that got my attention last week. First, a Chinese company called the Shanghai Electric Group signed a $10-billion deal to sell 42 coal-fired thermal-generation units to an Indian conglomerate called the Reliance ADA Group, the...[read more]

2010 has been a bad year for climate, and an even worse year for climate policy. But for that very reason, it’s been a good year for geoengineering—the notion that humans can deliberately manipulate the climate and cool the earth. Official Washington is starting to take geoengineering seriously: The Government Accountability Office and a...[read more]

Two unrelated stories concerning the science of climate change caught my attention yesterday. The first was the announcement of a new report on solar variability, published in Nature, which appeared to upend established thinking about the impact of solar cycles on the earth's climate. The other was a discussion on Shell's climate blog of...[read more]

The article Geoengineering: The Inescapable Truth of Getting to 350 from online hybrid magazine / academic publication The Solutions Journal appeared in my inbox today. We can argue back and forth about the societal and ecological implications of geoengineering. That's not the point of this post. What struck me as unique in this...[read more]

Inhabitat has a post on yet another crackpot geoengineering scheme - people really do waste a lot of time trying to find ways to avoid harnessing renewable energy sources - Bill Gates Announces Funding for Seawater-Spraying Cloud Machines. Environmentalists have long argued about whether geoengineering (using technology to alter the...[read more]

Bill Gates, the very macro-founder of Microsoft and godfather to PCs everywhere, has begun channeling some of his massive coffers into green tech ventures. He may not be the first IT mogul to dive into green tech funding, but Gates is certainly diving in headfirst. The question is, is he diving into the shallow end? So far he’s...[read more]

The Ottawa Citizen has a story this morning about multibillionaire Bill Gates and his funding of projects that are aimed at controlling the Earth’s climate in the face of rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and the resulting warming of the biosphere. I won’t go into too much detail, except to say that University of Calgary...[read more]

For all those lamenting the decline of science journalism in print and on television, its worth checking out the growing number of science podcasts. One great example is Public Radio International's The World: Science hosted by Rhitu Chaterjee. The show has a more global focus than most other programs, including some recent interviews...[read more]

This week's Economist includes coverage of a recent meeting of scientists at Asilomar, in California, to discuss the ground rules for pursuing "geoengineering", the deliberate, large-scale modification of the earth's environment. The purpose of the geoengineering now under consideration is to limit or reverse the effects of climate...[read more]

A Hard Look at the Perils and Potential of Geoengineering by Jeff Goodell: In the beginning, I had my doubts. The Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies, held last week at the Asilomar conference grounds near Monterey, Calif., was touted as an “unprecedented” gathering of 175 scientists, environmental...[read more]

Both Wired and the New Scientist covered a somewhat controversial gathering of geo-engineering scientists and policy makers at Asilomar last week that evoked both nostalgia and criticism. Nostalgia for the original conference that last week's was modeled after -- a 1975 meeting of scientific minds intent on self-regulating recombinant...[read more]

From the “What GAO Found” summary of Preliminary Observations on Geoengineering Science, Federal Efforts, and Governance Issues [PDF]: Substantial uncertainties remain on the efficacy and potential environmental impacts of proposed geoengineering approaches, because geoengineering research and field experiments to date have been...[read more]

Take a step back from the daily to-and-fro about climate change, and it’s hard to find any reason to cheer. Copenhagen was pretty much a flop. The Republicans somehow captured a 41-vote majority in the U.S. Senate. Climate scientists are under attack. We continue to emit CO2 into the air at what should be an alarming pace, and many...[read more]

Jeff Goodell: ‘It’s a bad idea for geoengineering to be the equivalent of the Pompeii sex room’: To head off the worst impacts of climate change, should human beings deliberately engineer the earth’s climate? Or rather, should they try, with uncertain odds of success and at least some chance of inadvertent catastrophe? Should they...[read more]

A few of the audience-submitted questions were: "What about the issue of water and nuclear? By that I mean that nuclear uses tremendous amounts of water - which is an issue in the West for instance?  is this too much of a strain on this natural resource?" "Turkey Point 6 & 7 south of Miami will cost from $24 B to $ 35 B,...[read more]